Kidnapping and organised crime are miserable realities in Italy even today and they have been the basis of thousands of thrillers, but Ammaniti’s novel I’m Not Scared is altogether more engrossing and wider in scope. His narrative, a series of short, snappy paragraphs and even briefer, biting sentences, moves with the pace of a crime novel, but the adventure takes place in the mind of a growing boy as well as in the place where he lives. Some of the set-pieces, especially the climactic search and chase at night over fields inhabited by creatures of real and imagined terror, are a tour de force of adventure writing.